Aris Roussinos, the Foreign Affairs Editor of UnHerd, has written an interesting piece in which he sets out the problems currently besetting Britain quite persuasively, but then suggests a somewhat eccentric solution: AngloFuturism.
Let’s begin with the diagnosis:
Just a few years ago, to be concerned with national resilience was to be seen as some kind of crank at best, and some kind of nativist radical at worst. Even at the height of Covid, to diagnose the fundamental problem facing Britain as one of eroded state capacity was often viewed by liberal commentators as some kind of quasi-Stalinist state worship, dangerously close to either fascism or communism.
Today, however, the British state’s inability to provide the most basic of functions – stopping crime; providing adequate healthcare, housing and functioning utilities like energy and water – are the central plank of political discussion. We have won the argument, yet there has been very little reflection on what this means, or how we have reached this dismal state of affairs. Worse, the people who brought us here are still in charge.
But what is the alternative? In their 2015 book Inventing the Future, the Left-wing writers Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams used the example of the Seventies crisis, which ushered in our current political and economic model, to examine the way in which one governing ideology can supersede its predecessor as the common-sense frame of political argument, and become hegemonic. The previous, dominant Keynesian framework had no immediate answer to the economic crisis of the time, and thus ceded ground to the free-market ideology of neoliberalism, which had created an ecosystem of think tanks and journalistic popularisers biding their time for a moment of crisis: “The neoliberals… had both a diagnosis of the problem and a solution.” As a result, they observe: “Government officials who were uncertain about what to do in the face of crisis found a plausible story in neoliberalism.”
The fundamental problem facing Britain today is the collapse of this chosen model, the fruit of a previous, lesser era of crisis. Instead of shoring up the state’s resilience to the pressures of an increasingly unstable world, the reliance on market forces has left the Government increasingly unable to impose order, provide functioning healthcare, keep the lights on or put roofs over people’s heads: a state that cannot provide these basic functions is really no state at all. We are witnessing the death spiral of the world created after the Seventies crisis; even conservatives now understand that things cannot continue as they are. To argue in favour of the current system is now the marginal and eccentric position: half the ideological battle has already been won.
And yet, no single viable alternative model is waiting in the wings; both parties are ideologically inflexible, far more so than voters. The most likely outcome is Westminster’s desperate political preservation of a rapidly collapsing system in which no one believes. The model has failed, but the people who imposed it, who genuinely believed in it and somehow still believe in it, remain in power.
There have been no consequences for their decades of failure, and the detachment of voters from the people who represent them has never been greater. This is a deeply dangerous, unstable situation, which has already given birth to conspiratorial political religions, such as QAnon, Russiagate, and the Great Reset, which will doubtless multiply as living standards continue to plummet and politicians continue to fail. They seek to discern some underlying logic or rationale to events, when there is only incompetence and a dying political system bereft of ideas. At a moment of grave national crisis, we require a statesman of historic stature, with the vision and will to steer us out of disaster. Instead, we’re getting Liz Truss.
But in reality, it no longer matters whether Truss or Sunak wins the battle to enter No 10. No one believes that either has any answers to the problems facing us, and the paper-thin dividing line between them is merely the narcissism of small differences. Similarly, the increasingly bitter battle over political control of the American state conceals the fact that whichever party wins will find themselves at the mercy of global forces they can no longer control. Across the Western world, the red lights are flashing in the cockpit, but no one knows how to fly the plane.
I’m not as down on Truss as Aris. Has what he calls “the free market ideology of neo-liberalism” really failed? At the risk of sounding like a die-hard Communist clinging on to his faith in the face of repeated failure, real free market liberalism hasn’t been tried in this country – and if you think the current energy crisis is the result of too much deregulation – of letting market forces rip – you haven’t been paying attention.
But no matter. Let’s now take a look at Aris’s solution.
As the Marxist thinker Wolfgang Streeck warns: “We are facing a long period of systemic disintegration, in which social structures become unstable and unreliable, and therefore uninstructive for those living in them…” It is a time, perhaps lasting centuries, when “deep changes will occur, rapidly and continuously, but they will be unpredictable and in any case ungovernable”. Life in such a society “offers rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age”.
How are we to manage life in this hard new world, for ourselves and our children? The survival of the British state, our ark in the coming storm, is paramount. Yet whether the British state will even exist at the end of the decade is still a matter of helpless conjecture. We must demand a wartime level of mobilisation focused on state resilience: we are now far beyond nudges and quick fixes. This is a campaign for the basic functions of the state: streets that are safe to walk, homes to live in, healthcare for those in need, universal access to food, warmth and shelter.
As Milton Friedman put it: “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” That time has now come. Of necessity, in a world without a convincing successor ideology, this new model of politics must be pragmatic and non-ideological. Centred on restoring the basic functions of statehood, it must unite Labour voters as well as Tories, socialists and conservatives. It is a call, I propose, for Anglofuturism.
“Anglo”, because Britain should survive as an entity focused on the health and prosperity of the people, and not merely as a theme park for international capital. Through shifting domestic industry abroad and encouraging mass immigration of low-wage labour at home, policymakers were able to create the illusion of prosperity, conjuring the outward form of a middle-class existence even as it demolished its foundations. But this world has now gone forever, leaving us poorer and less resilient.
The “futurism” is for the understanding that unlike our current political class, this approach looks beyond the electoral cycle. It is the idea that the state, and the nation, have interests to be safeguarded over the course of generations, and that infrastructure should be built now to secure the lives and prosperity of our descendents. “Futurism” also because it harnesses the optimism and high modernism of the post-war era, a vanished world of frenetic housebuilding and technological innovation where British scientific research could lead the world, and produce higher living standards through its fusion with well-paid, high-skilled labour.
The Anglofuturist vision of Britain is one where every county town has its own Small Modular Reactor providing clean, abundant nuclear energy. It is a country where cheap and reliable high-speed rail darts across the country, through the new towns where everyone who wants can have their own warm and spacious home, past the small family farms which provide the country’s food security. In the clean skies, electric airships move freight across the country; in our seas, teeming with fish, vast arrays of domestically-manufactured wind and wave power stations, the product of a revived industrial strategy, unite British ingenuity and manufacturing capacity in clean power generation that is the envy of the world.
Hmmm. I like a lot of that – a small nuclear reactor in every town, high speed rail, food security, and who could possibly object to “streets that are safe to walk, homes to live in, healthcare for those in need, universal access to food, warmth and shelter”? But how does Aris think we’re going to pay for all these nice things? The reason the state has become so hollowed out isn’t just due to woeful mismanagement by mediocre politicians and officials who are hamstrung by a moribund ideology and have no better ideas. It’s also because we’ve run out of money. Absent a magic money tree, I cannot see much future for Anglofuturism.
Worth reading in full.
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‘… real free market liberalism hasn’t been tried in this country…’
Not quite true. It was a novel situation which occurred in this Country in the late 18th Century and provided the right conditions for the Industrial Revolution – why in Britain and not elsewhere – and lasted into the early 19th Century until Government realised it was missing out and there was a growing new area into which it could stick its nose and muddle and meddle.
But certainly it describes in a nutshell recent times. Failure is always attributed to those parts of the market that are relatively free rather than to the real cause, State intervention, and the remedy must therefore be more State intervention.
With respect to lots of baby reactors dotted over the landscape: the point about having a grid with multiple large generators strategically located, is to provide stability and continuity of supply in the event of failure of one or more generators, or the need for repair/maintenance.
It partly is the problem with wind mills and intermittency of supply due to changing wind conditions and why the argument ‘the wind is always blowing somewhere’ doesn’t work.
The advantages of “baby” reactors is well advertised, namely production largely in a factory. I was disappointed to learn how big the proposed RR SMR is and I would prefer a smaller one.
An advantage of spreading these around rather than lining them up at large sites to replicate the old reactors is the reduced transmission losses. It ought to be possible too to utilise the heat wich is typically wasted by having market gardens of district heating schemes fed from them.
Local reactors would also reduce public fear. Once they had experienced living with one on the outskirts of their town or at the nearby industrial park, they would realise they are not ticking time bombs.
What is not well advertised are the related issues with unit pricing, and the relationship with other parties, such as housing developers, private owners versus landlords and so on. District heating looks like a good idea, but once it’s in use it probably interferes with the choice of generating power at any given time, unless there’s some kind of local storage. At any rate, it’s another interface to manage. I know there have been systems like that in the past in England, though, e.g. when the old coal fired Battersea power station was operational.
Gotta love these American fairly tales with their neverchanging storyline of In the olde days, man lived in blissful anarchy and everything was perfect and then the evil state appeared out of nowhere, tried to take everthing over. Since then, it has all been going to hell in a handcard!
For a nice example of what the state busied itself with when it was still exclusively controlled by the rich and propertied while everybody else was free to die in whichever ways he liked best, one can look here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre
Peterloo was a monumental cock-up that resulted in 18 people dying. More people die than that on an average night out in Chicago. It wasn’t a ‘massacre’. It’s become a left wing myth that has become ever more fanciful in the retelling.
I’m fascinated by the leftist fairytale that in ye olde days, man lived in a blissful rural idyll and everything was perfect until evil industrialists enslaved the population in towns and cities. Forget the ignorance, the squalor, the disease and dunking local women in the village pond on witchcraft charges because people were dying of disease due to the squalor and ignorance…
Peterloo was a monumental cock-up that resulted in 18 people dying. More people die than that on an average night out in Chicago.
That’s besides the point. The state existed during the time of the anarchist paradise when everything was supposedly perfect because it didn’t. And it also intervened in society. Just on behalf of the people who nowadays want to abolish it because it doesn’t still exclusively act on their behalf.
If it moves, tax it.
If it keeps moving, legislate it.
If it stops moving, use taxpayers’ money to subsidise it.
Something like that. Who said it?
Where does one begin.
The failures of the state aren’t failures of the free market but the complete opposite, excess regulation and state meddlibg. TY points that out very well.
The rest of the authors “solution” is not a solution at all but an anxious call for something to be done. He doesn’t know what but he knows it should be done at a national level, it should probably involve more nuclear energy and fast trains and it has an authoritarian, fascist whiff about it with the emphasis of law and order and “beyond the electoral cycle”.
And he’s betting that putting Anglo in there will energise the crowd a bit.
Half baked, intellectual crap from someone that I am willing to bet spends his time thinking and writing and has no personal experience to understand that wealth creation and prosperity comes from enterprise, free exchange and hard work and not from the drawing board of self important, clever central planners.
His assertion that providing health care is one of the basic functions of the state shows the author’s complete lack of imagination and his indoctrinated state of mind.
The basic function of the state is to protect against external attack and to provide law and order for its sitizens. That’s it. The rest are nice to haves, or not, depending on where you stand.
To quote the great Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions, only trade offs.
Expecting or encouraging governments or the state to “solve” all our “problems” doesn’t seem to have been a success in the very recent past.
Some interesting ideas there, though I don’t think the solution is just about technology. The current mess that our nation has become is not due to a lack of the right technology but also a corrosive culture of national self-loathing and contempt for the norms of civilised society. There is a famous quote, possibly attributed to G.K. Chesterton: “when man stops believing in God he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything”. Believing in anything opens the door to insanity, which we are witnessing in the warped cults and dogmas of “progressive” ideology. Reconstructing UK society is going to be difficult until we get rid of this widespread madness and restore sanity.
“also a corrosive culture of national self-loathing and contempt for the norms of civilised society”
fostered and ramped up by academia. Time to close the universities.
I read this piece early, and was surprised to find that
Actually guys. I kind of like our old way of doing things.
Although committing the ultimate sin of replying to my own post…I didn’t mention that anyone who describes the WEF and Agenda 2030 as ‘conspiracy theories’ clearly is well off the pace with current affairs.
Yes, it sounds remarkably like “we need a Great Reset.”
In fact the solution to any gloom concerning the state of the nation is very straightforward:
‘If you knows of a better ‘ole…..’
I found myself in Eastern Europe a while ago, sounding off like a broken record about Britain’s problems, and the assembled company looked at me with incredulity.
‘Britain is a sanatorium…..’ was the consensus.
The problems we have are first world problems created by hopelessly incompetent leadership, and we voted for these lunatics from all three main parties over the last thirty years.
Democracy: the least worst system of government.
Nevertheless, to be born an Englishman today, incredibly, even more so than when the statement was first made, is still to be ‘born with a winning ticket in the lottery of life’.
I feel you are too optimistic about our ability and the willingness of the political class and the blob to allow us to prosper.
Slightly OT:
Juliet Samuel today writes in the DT “How governments and the cult of Net Zero wrecked the energy market” (H/T Net Zero Watch). But that is not quite right as it was the entire political class that wrecked the energy market. All of them. They were falling over themselves to be more keen on Net Zero than whatever the current policy ordained, just as with Covid lockdowns.
We must not let them off the hook, not to protect Milliband, Cameron-Clegg, May or Boris, but to ensure they are all tarred for the damage they have inflicted.
As Margaret Thatcher once said:
‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.’
Our problem is that the population has been conned into thinking that we’ve not become a socialist country over the past 25 years.
But when Wall Street runs out of other people’s overleveraged money and their bad bets go south, they get bailed out. And they laugh all the way to the bank. Talk about moral hazard!
Indeed! Crony capitalism. (i.e. not capitalism at all).
Corporatism. One might note that Musso said his government was not Fascist, rather Corporatist. Which is just another form, in reality.
Neoliberalism failed in 2008, when the cacophony of voices who had been crying Profit! Profit! Profit! since some time in the 1980s suddenly switched to crying Bailout! Bailout! Bailout! after it became known that they had just gambled away everything entrusted to them without generating any profits except in form of gargantuan charges they had paid to themselves.
What blew up in 2008 was the financial markets in derivatives and bank debt. These had expanded because governments in the USA and UK especially had expanded the money supply well beyond the needs of the economy.
in the USA the issue was exacerbated by the requirement to make home loans to people who would never repay. These were packaged up in novel ways to pretend the credit was good. Regulators did not notice!
2008 was nothing to do with free markets, capitalism or even normal banking. In evidence I point out that several western economies did not burn them because they had not committed the faults I mention.
of interest, whereas the UK banking sector has been blamed, most of it was solvent, albeit temporarily illiquid. Even the London branch of Lehmans paid all its creditors and the surplus was sent to their NY head office.
notice also that UK regulators wanted all mortgage lenders to copy Northern Rock and criticised managements that did not do so. The pressure was to behave irresponsibly.
Top comment. Clinton and the pressure his government placed on Banks to engage in ‘Sub Prime’ lending played a major, if not the major, part in ‘the new paradigm’ delusion and subsequent global financial disaster. ‘No more boom and bust’ Brown’s reputation never recovered, except in the Royal Navy!
Privatize the profits, socialize the costs, lather, rinse, and repeat….
The problem with investment bankers is that they’ll eventually run out of other people’s money.
🙂
The failure of the British state is because there’s too much of it and it interferes too much. Capitalism always gets blamed for state socialism’s failures and the solution offered is always more state socialism.
The best option is to allow a free market in energy. If the public want green power, they can pay for it from an unsubsidised green supplier. If they want it from gas or coal, they can get it from a fossil fuel supplier. If the public are mostly eco-loons as the state claim, then they’ll happily pay for more expensive green power and the coal and gas companies will go bust. Let’s see who wins…
“But how does Aris think we’re going to pay for all these nice things? The reason the state has become so hollowed out isn’t just due to woeful mismanagement by mediocre politicians and officials who are hamstrung by a moribund ideology and have no better ideas. It’s also because we’ve run out of money. Absent a magic money tree, I cannot see much future for Anglofuturism.”
I know I will probably be crucified for saying this, but as a Left Lockdown Sceptic myself (albeit a post-capitalist rather than a socialist or Marxist), that magic money tree (with the same initials, MMT) already exists. Just ask author Rodger Malcolm Mitchell. In a nutshell, Monetary Sovereignty, similar Modern Monetary Theory, posits that any government that is the issuer of it’s own sovereign currency, such as the UK or USA or Canada or the EU (but not the Euro countries individually, or state and local governments currently), by definition has infinite money that it can create on an ad hoc basis, no taxes or borrowing required. Period, full stop. Life is NOT a zero-sum game. And before anyone cries “inflation!”, keep in mind that inflations are caused by shortages of goods and services, NOT by money creation. And solving the shortages can be done by the government purchasing such goods and services at a premium and selling them at a loss, so as to incentivize production of such. Raising interest rates can also fight inflation by raising the value of the currency and slowing down borrowing and spending, but doing so is a razor-sharp, double-edged sword in practice.
QED
Sovereign governments can clearly create as much money as they like, but they can’t force anybody else to accept that the value of that money is unchanged.
They can and do have absolute control of the value of the currency they issue. That’s why it is called FIAT currency, as it is valued by fiat. Of course, when it is not formally backed by anything other than the full faith and credit of the government, it is in practice backed by all the goods and services of the economy. That governments choose to let the market decide its de facto value does not invalidate the fact of control over valuation of money if they wanted to. They can redefine a currency at will, and/or raise or lower interest rates.
Decades of neoliberal austerity would do that.
How governments and the cult of net zero wrecked the energy market
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/08/27/how-governments-and-the-cult-of-net-zero-wrecked-the-energy-market/
I wonder why we do not see common sense like this from the Telegraph’s business reporters, such as the naive Ben Marlow?
By Paul Homewood
Good News Weekend
We are a nation run by cowards but we will win in the end
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(1 year, 1 week, 1 day from our first appearance there)
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It sounds to me like Aris also believes in unicorns, Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy.
Or maybe, it’s Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz “Click your heels together three times and say ‘There’s no place like home‘ and you’ll be there.”
There IS no Anglo left to preserve. It’s been destroyed by mass immigration and multi-culturalism. Now we are disparate “communities” living apart together in the land that used to be Angloland (England).
“officials who are hamstrung by a moribund ideology and have no better ideas.”
They are not allowed ideas and definitely not verbalise them. It seems no official can make an intelligent decision of their own and it is this that stultifies progress.
Yep it’s like the governmental equivalent of the SouthPark gnomes venture startup:
Underpants, ?, Money